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Nolan makes blockbusters. He trades in spectacle. As such, it’s not necessarily wrong that he aims to elicit awe rather than compassion.

I probably don’t need to tell you that Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar is beautiful. Nolan is a master of scenes that genuinely look and feel like visits to another universe: cities that fold in on themselves, in Inception, or a field that sprouts lightbulbs like rows of corn, in The Prestige. In The Dark Knight, he managed to make the Joker, one of the campiest figures in pop culture, into a genuinely frightening villain, largely through good costume design. So if I tell you that Interstellar shows you things you’ve never imagined—ocean waves the size of mountain ranges, a planet-sized ball that holds dozens of galaxies, and what is supposedly the most accurate simulation of a black hole ever created, constructed over the course of a year with the help of theoretical physicist Kip Thorne—I’m only telling you that it’s a Christopher Nolan movie. You know it looks great. That’s why you buy the IMAX tickets.

What you really want to know, I suspect, is whether the movie has Christopher Nolan Disease: a saddening affliction, most common among blockbuster film directors named Christopher Nolan, in which vast, immersive, awe-inspiring worlds are created solely in order to tell the same damn story over and over again. There is a man. He is a sad man. His sadness makes him no less manly. The wife of this man, she is dead now. (If this man be a Batman, who has taken no wife, his parents will be dead, and also, his girlfriend. Yes, a clever twist, friends: They did not marry, but that did not stop her from being dead! Sad.) The man’s sadness, a great struggle conducted in the deep darkness of his soul, fuels his life’s grandest endeavor: The blowing-up of cool shit. In this noble pursuit of the blowing-up of things, the man’s wounds are healed and his masculinity reaffirmed.

Memento, The Prestige, Inception, The Dark Knight Trilogy: Each and every one tells this story. So the real question about Interstellar is not whether it’s beautiful, but whether telling a story that covers the entire span of space and time has caused Nolan to broaden his emotional palette. The answer: Well, sort of. This time, not only is the hero’s wife dead, he’s also on a quest to reconnect with his estranged daughter. Hey, at least Nolan’s picking new female family members for dudes to be sad about. Maybe, in ten years, we’ll get to see a Christopher Nolan movie about a guy who’s really bummed about his aunt.

It’s a shame to see Interstellar fall prey to Christopher Nolan Disease, because it opens with a pretty great story. In a near future that’s just a generation or so away from our own, the Earth is dying due to a mysterious “blight” that’s wiping out crops. People are starving, and those who don’t starve will eventually suffocate, because the death of plant life is causing the atmosphere to run out of oxygen. The soil blows across the landscape, a constant ambient tide of dust that sometimes coalesces into huge storms. Everything is a Dorothea Lange portrait of the Dust Bowl. Most of humanity is dead, and the rest are farmers, whether they like it or not, including Matthew McConaughey’s character Cooper, a former engineer. Intelligence has no place here; learning is pointless; ambition, talent, reason, none of these matter more than wringing the last few ounces of food out of the dying planet. Going to college is seen as wasteful self-indulgence: What could you possibly learn that’s more important than farming? Technology is useful only insofar as it can produce more farm equipment.

There’s a genuinely oppressive sense of progress flowing backwards, in these scenes. Humanity is dying not simply because we’ve encountered great obstacles, but because we’ve given up the love of learning that might allow us to save ourselves. Cooper's daughter, Murph, is sent home from school because she refuses to believe that the Moon landings were faked. (There are also some trademark Nolan crypto-conservative mumblings about evil people who demand “social responsibility,” but let’s be real: If any one political party is going to cause the anti-intellectual dystopia, it’s going to be the one that believes birth control pills are abortion and climate change is a matter of opinion.) If the movie could stick to this message, it might actually be a great film.

And then Matthew McConaughey accidentally stumbles into the headquarters of NASA, which has apparently been conducting billion-dollar missions in total secrecy all this time, and then it turns out that he somehow knows people at NASA despite the fact that he didn’t know NASA still existed, andthen NASA offers him the job of flying a spaceship to a distant galaxy in search of a new inhabitable planet within about five minutes (“You’re the best pilot we ever had!”Uh, he was?) and, well, the movie that started out as a stirring defense of human intelligence quickly gets pretty darn stupid. Also, remarkably anti-science: The amazing accuracy of that black hole model is significantly diminished when the movie’s plot revolves around dudes jumping into it. A black hole is a collapsed star so dense that it devours light, warps space, and slows or even stops time. In this movie, people are just hanging out by the edges and hopping in like it’s a big, scary-looking swimming pool. Although to be fair, it may function a little differently from the black holes our scientists have been studying, because this one turns out to be powered (I swear) by love.

Again, it’s not that this stuff isn’t cool (well, most of it). Invoking relativity gives Nolan a chance to play around with time, as he did in Inception. The characters visit planets close to the black hole, where time is radically slowed down, so that every hour equates to seven years in the outside world. Simple mistakes cost decades. There is a real poignancy to Cooper's growing realization that his children on Earth are going to grow up, grow old and perhaps die over the course of his next few days or hours—that he slipped out for a quick adventure and wound up missing fatherhood. But it’s undermined by Nolan’s ham-handed insistence that adventure is the worthier thing, that people (meaning men) must be bold and brave and explore things, that “love” and family are great and all, but ultimately, best expressed through skipping town to go blow up cool shit. The best thing a daughter can do, in this scenario, is to stop holding her father back and give him permission to abandon her, trusting that he loves her anyway, in some way that can only be demonstrated by obscure hooey-involving love-fueled black holes.

Which brings us to the women, where Nolan’s relentless focus on stoic masculine trauma often causes him to drop the ball. It’s not, I think, that Nolan dislikes women: He just doesn’t entirely see the point of them outside of their occasional utility as motivating factors for men. Jessica Chastain, a great actress, plays Cooper's daughter Murph as an adult, and this character—a bright girl in a world that has no place for bright girls, a woman who spends her life trying to save a doomed planet—ought to be tremendously compelling. In practice, she mostly cries about her father. Why wouldn’t she? Murph’s father is the whole point of Murph; she exists to react, not to act.

The other female presence in the picture is a female scientist on the black-hole voyage, played by Anne Hathaway. Her main contributions to science include (1) falling down so that men have to rescue her, (2) trying to derail a mission so she can visit her boyfriend, (3) planning to impregnate herself (I think) with no less than 300 fertilized embryos so as to resurrect the human race one unassisted childbirth at a time, and (4) giving a speech about how Love is the fifth dimension. I like Hathaway, as an actress, but there’s no way to make this stuff not insulting to women. She’s the face of female space exploration, and she’s literally only on the spaceship so that she can go see her boyfriend and have babies.

Nolan makes blockbusters. He trades in spectacle. As such, it’s not necessarily wrong that he aims to elicit awe rather than compassion or that his human drama is a little sketchy and undercooked. At the end of the day, with Nolan, you’ll remember the folding cities and revolving hallways and mountain-sized waves, not the characters’ names. And that's par for the course, with big spectacle movies. Gravity, the film to which Interstellar is being compared, had a pretty thin plot, too–a plot that revolved around an astronaut grieving her dead daughter, no less.

But Nolan's plot isn't just thin; it's almost copy-paste. And with Interstellar, we end up where we always do: With a very sad and manly man crying manly tears to express his heroic grief manfully. We’ve seen it all before; we’re just seeing it in a new landscape this time. And, honestly, that landscape is so big and beautiful and strange that it wouldn’t be wrong for Nolan to consider removing the people from the screen completely, so we can simply sit and marvel at the pictures he creates.

"(There are also some trademark Nolan crypto-conservative mumblings about evil people who demand “social responsibility,” but let’s be real: If any one political party is going to cause the anti-intellectual dystopia, it’s going to be the one that believes birth control pills are abortion and climate change is a matter of opinion.)"

This is when I discovered that you are an idiot. Birth control pills are abortion? Really?! Conservatives don't think this. What an uninformed worldview you have.

Climate change? You really need to learn something about this subject. Look into its history. Do a search for Lord Monckton. When you actually learn something about this, you will discover that it is literally a fraud.

Posted by ImRight on 2016-01-07 15:54:15

Christopher Nolan is Racist. Just ask Zoe Kravitz about it. He banned actors like her from auditioning because he said he didn't want "urban" on the Dark Knight Rises movie.

Urban is a racist's coded way of saying for Black in case you didn't know. Lenny Kravitz and Lisa Bonet are her parents, both are biracial and neither is "ghetto" so what part of Zoe's biracial heritage alarmed Christopher Nolan's racist A-s? I will never support a Known racist and I know many who are the same.

Christopher Nolan has casting calls like he is Paula Deen.

Posted by UmOkayIfUsaySo on 2015-07-11 10:02:06

IT'S NOT A BLACK HOLE! IT'S A WORMHOLE!

Posted by Alex George on 2015-06-19 02:41:43

You just didn't get the movie my darling. Study a lil bit more, ok? Go back to scholl, have a talk with u'r phisics professor and than watch the movie again.

Everything that u have write is just wrong.

Posted by B. on 2014-12-11 05:33:59

this is the best article so far of this movie, thank you so much

Posted by EM on 2014-12-04 09:16:31

The plan doesn't involve anyone impregnating themselves. Al the frozen embryos were going to be grown and raised in test tubes. That's why the crazy MALE character near the end was going to ditch all of them and complete the mission by himself - fly the ship by himself to the desert planet and raise the new batch of human embryos by himself...

Posted by Intranet on 2014-11-29 13:14:30

The plan doesn't involve anyone impregnating themselves. Al the frozen embryos were going to be grown and raised in test tubes. That's why the crazy MALE character near the end was going to ditch all of them and complete the mission by himself - fly the ship by himself to the desert planet and raise the new batch of human embryos by himself.

Posted by Intranet on 2014-11-29 13:13:40

But if you're going to talk about the cruel nature of evolution, then you can't disregard the cruel nature of evolutionary survival that allowed us to be here at this stage at all. Young girls have been forced or pressured to get pregnant at early ages all thoughout human history, why would the brink of extinction be any different? I wish that wasn't the case, but if your position is that things like that shouldn't happen, then you're going against the evolutionary history of all forms of non-plant life on the planet. If a life form just up and quit whenever survival became difficult, the planet would be barren. Your conclusion is based on the thing you are arguing against.

Posted by Frank MacCormack on 2014-11-28 22:58:49

Well, your body is not the one being used as an incubator in this "plan." Growing humans and then impregnating them as immediately as you can, and just continuing doing that? How is that not disgusting? If humans were going to die out, then they absolutely should. That's called evolution and it's what's kept our planet alive. It gave birth to us, but eventually we will have to give way and just go extinct, giving way to other life forms.

I know it's a movie and all, I am talking theoretically...

Posted by duckie on 2014-11-28 22:12:56

I am usually one of the first to call out decisions that are made without female input, but I think you are being quite silly here. Sure it's not an amazing plan, but when we watch a movie, we have to suspend our disbelief and take a lot for granted. In this movie, they (albeit lightly) establish that for whatever reason, humans will die here on Earth, and that's it, so we need another plan to survive as a race. You may be okay with the extinction of the human race in order to save some future generations from unknown hardships, but that's your opinion. It's about making a tough decision...for you the better answer is extinction, and I would disagree. But I guess that's because I don't have a uterus? I don't see what that has to do with it and it's pretty offensive.

Posted by Frank MacCormack on 2014-11-24 16:23:31

I don't think logic comes into it either. Even allowing that "saving" humanity can be defined as "making a whole bunch of new people" rather than "saving the ones we already have" (and honestly I think that's a ridiculous way of looking at the problem, analogous to saying that it's OK to let a person die because, in the next room, a baby is being born), the society that will result from Plan B will inevitably be sick and dysfunctional. It will have no ties of culture and history to actual humanity, and the idea that its members will be willing to subjugate themselves to a planet and society they never knew is ludicrous. It's a depraved idea that could only have been the brainchild of someone who never really thought through its implications, which is why I doubt anyone involved with the process has ever had their own uterus.

Posted by Abigail Nussbaum on 2014-11-23 00:45:58

If you think about it logically it's the only way to get such a huge number of people to colonize a new planet with few resources. Gender doesn't come into it.

Posted by iori on 2014-11-22 12:01:42

This article is a little harsh on the Nolan agenda and generally anti-feminist view of the world but the article is right on the pseudo-science which fuels the latter half of the film. I liked the earlier parts, the somber, depression era tinged images still beautiful to look at. Getting a little bored with M.M. he's been good but he's starting to be over exposed, I couldn't help but think of True Detective which is not a good think in a movie about space, time, relativity and dare I say it....LOVE.

Posted by Josiane Ochman on 2014-11-19 17:56:16

I laugh 'til it hurts whenever I read one of Sady's posts and I can see her grinding the gears to inject her brand of astigmatic feminism into what, on the surface, she seems to enjoy!

Posted by Brevity is... on 2014-11-17 19:43:20

i think what you say here is plain b.s. The movie is based on pure theoretical science and is put in a way to mainstream audience that would captivate and enlighten the views of masses.Instead of writing all this b.s try to appreciate athe eeffort and deication made towards making such a grandeur of a movie.p.s i dont intend to break down all the female gung ho and black hole knowledge u seem to have coz i already saw someone did it.

Posted by rahil on 2014-11-17 05:19:29

Wow, this article is complete garbage. I shall time my time and dismiss all the ignorant statements you have made toward the movie.

1. At the beginning of the film we see Cooper conducting actual live NASA test flights (not simulation like all current NASA pilots have), this establishes his previous connection with NASA. He knows one person at the current underground NASA compound, and that's Professor Brand who he worked with at NASA when he was a pilot.

2. How is this film anti-science? The black hole is power by love? What the fuck are you talking about? You are a full of shit, this film is ground on real science and theories but it also has sci-fi here and there. To get a better understanding of the science behind this film, I suggest you read The Science of Interstellar byKip Thorne.

3. Wasn't Cooper also a crying mess and actually the one reacting to Murph, sobbing during the video messages, always thinking about the time dilation difference during his missions, hoping not too much time would pass so that he could still get a chance to see his kids. At the end Murph told her father to leave her hospital room because she wanted to be with her kids and loved ones, and told him to move on.

4. Anne Hathaway didn't get saved by a men but rather by a robot, with no sex gender. She fell because she was trying to savage the information box from the other ships crash wreckage. They had 2 options left after that, head towards Dr. Mann planet or to the planet which her boyfriend was at. She explained she wanted to go the planet where her boyfriend was at because she trusted the feed back he was sending to them, maybe it had something to do with love. That maybe love was something greater than what our human understanding tells us, that it might transcend time and space (which it wasn't, it was gravity). She also explained to Cooper that he should be has unbiased when it came to him choosing to see his children or continuing the mission if Dr. Mann planet was a fail. She was never going to impregnate herself with those eggs, you idiot. Those eggs would be incubated and they would all act as care takers for the first generation and so forth. She never did once say that the Fifth dimension was love.

5. The entire dad and daughter story was never part of Nolan's screen play but rather part of the original screen play of Spielberg. Nolan had to incorporate that part into his screen play because the studio wanted him to.

6. Gravity is a overrated movie that got all the science wrong and was completely simple minded. But I guess you loved it because the lead role was female. Even through she was a weak character that actually reacted to everything a man told her to react to. That entire movie is about a female character that need the introductions of a man to get through every obstacle in front of her. The entire film portrays her as a dismal in distress.

Posted by Mr.A on 2014-11-15 22:48:36

And you're a dumbass

Posted by Joe on 2014-11-15 14:03:37

Love this analysis. We need a nice grid to categorize the sexist/racist/classist factors of movies, esp the ones nominated for awards. The heaviest numbers would probably be in the dead/unavailable wife/wouldhavebeenleading woman, followed by provocatively dressed daughter/young woman character but not leading figure, and etc. What is it with these middle aged white male writers?

Posted by M. BButler on 2014-11-15 13:23:35

The only way this movie makes sense is if you are completely drunk or stoned... The ending was just like a damn M Night Shyamlan movie...

Posted by Legend on 2014-11-14 20:15:39

Sady, you are an idiot. Nolan is probably the most talented and best director today and one of the best directors in history. His movies are emotional, have incredible visuals, and are intellectually engaging. I'm sorry but this article is absolute b.s.

Posted by Will on 2014-11-13 20:57:00

So Nolan pursues "the blowing up of cool shit" in this movie? I guess the airlock accident was really a central feature of the film for you. There wasn't a lot of blowing things up in this movie.

"Based on iffy science" which I guess comes down to the fact that you think they're just too darned close to that big black hole. Yes Mable when you're in *orbit* around a black hole, as the planet was, and their spacecraft was, the crushing gravity is not an issue. When you're in free fall, whatever the object providing the gravitational pull, you're weightless. But anyway there's lots of people on the internet who are sure they know more about the reality of being close to a black hole than Kip Thorne does, and they all seem to be assuring us how silly it all is.

Posted by sonoran on 2014-11-13 10:03:09

I don't think Hathaway plans to impregnate herself with the frozen embryos. Rather, her plan calls for the first few to be "auto-raised," then impregnated themselves once they've reached maturity (well, just the women, obviously). That this is a horrible dystopian nightmare is something that appears to have escaped Nolan's notice. Only a man, I think, would not only come up with such a horrifying plan, but make it the brain-child of a woman.

Posted by Abigail Nussbaum on 2014-11-13 02:46:06

You've done the best defense I've heard of the movie's first 45 minutes. I didn't care much for that part of the movie myself, mostly because I felt like Nolan could have made it a lot more concise just by giving Cooper a plausible reason for already being involved in the NASA program (hell, they could have just had him doing it in secret disguised as a "second job", explaining both why he's involved and why he just happens to live so close to the NASA base in one blow).